When Ellie Walker actor Elinor Donahue left The Andy Griffith Show after just a dozen episodes, questions lingered about her sudden departure.
Karen Knotts’ recent memoir Tied Up in Knotts: My Dad and Me chronicles the author’s recollections of her father Don Knotts’ years in the entertainment industry.
She also in the book captured memories from her father’s co-stars throughout the years, including Donahue, who opened up to Karen about her years on the classic television comedy and the events that led up to her decision to leave.
Donahue said the sudden ending of her longtime series ‘Father Knows Best’ affected her deeply
The actor met Don Knotts’ daughter Karen in 2016 on their way to a Griffith Show fan festival called Mayberry Days. Karen, who performed as a comedian in her “Tied Up in Knotts” show, ran into Donahue on a shuttle to the event, where the actor was scheduled for a guest appearance.
Karen revealed in her memoir that when Donahue joined the Griffith Show cast, she had just come off starring in the iconic 1950s show Father Knows Best, which suddenly ended with no finale or closure. In addition, she had married early, given birth to a child, and divorced. It was a great deal for the actor, age 23 in 1960, to handle.
“I was playing younger than my age, usually, and accustomed to playing somebody’s child,” Donahue told Karen. “[Father Knows Best stars] Jane Wyatt and Robert Young were tired and didn’t want to continue. So we just quit and never got a chance to say goodbye. We never did a last episode, never had a party. There was no closure. It was all of a sudden, boom, we’re not going to do it anymore. It was like being kicked out of a bird’s nest.”
As the comedian’s daughter noted, “[Donahue] had no idea how to live a normal adult life. She married, and the relationship ended in divorce and left her with a toddler to care for.”
The actor said she had ’emotional problems’ and was ‘becoming anorexic’
As Donahue explained, it was all of the stress from her professional and personal life that reared its head during her time on the Griffith Show. The actor was not entirely feeling a part of the cast, due to moments such as Griffith’s giving some of her lines to other actors, including Don Knotts.
All of her “emotional problems,” she told Karen, resulted in her “having a weight difficulty. The Thinner I got, the Thinner I wanted to be.” Donahue, Knotts wrote, was “becoming anorexic.”
Elinor Donahue asked to be released from her contract with the ‘Griffith Show’
Donahue, Karen Knotts wrote, felt worse about her appearance during the show’s wardrobe fittings.
“Wardrobe would bring clothes in, and if they fit, I thought I was too fat and wouldn’t eat,” she revealed. “At one point I was pretty darned sick.”
The former Odd Couple star developed pneumonia and was hospitalized, forcing the Griffith Show writers to work around her illness. When she returned to the show’s set, Donahue was still feeing unhappy and made the decision to end her three-year contract with the show after just about a dozen episodes.
“I knew that it was time for the season to end, and I had a three-year contract,” Knotts quoted Donahue as saying. “I had my agent ask for my release, and they said OK. There didn’t seem to be any fight about it, so I left the show at the end of the first year.”
